Building a future where human capacity grows alongside AI.
Commercial AI was built to provide rapid, simplified, assured answers and automate routine tasks. That design has given rise to widespread cognitive surrender: the uncritical adoption of AI-generated output without internal reasoning, oversight, or verification.
It happens when students use AI in place of learning, when employees submit its output as their own, and even when experts rely on it outside their expertise.
As commercial AI narrows how people think, it also narrows the value of human labor — the same convenience that erodes judgment makes people easier to replace. We believe cognitive surrender is dangerous, but it is not an inevitable consequence of the rise of AI.
The dominant path: AI capability so thoroughly outstrips human capacity that people end up intellectually outmatched and dependent on it.
As AI grows, so does its ability to elevate human thinking — if it's built differently. Our vision draws on a decade of research in Computational Creativity, a field that preceded today's commercial generative AI.
We build AI differently, and make it openly available — while helping the world use today's tools in ways that elevate human capacity instead of surrendering it.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.Frank Herbert, Dune